SOLIDWORKS Sustainability Xpress

You drive your Prius to work, you’re reading this blog on an energy efficient monitor, but the burritos you ate last night are not doing the planet any favors. How do you remove this feeling of contrition?

How about making your designs more planet friendly? SOLIDWORKS Labs now has the beta version of SOLIDWORKS Sustainability Xpress. (I think they called it Sage at SOLIDWORKS World.) With this new tool you can experiment with materials, manufacturing techniques and even manufacturing location to see how these factors affect your part’s “footprint”.

That video leaves me scratching my head. Is it marketing hype? Think you could use it? Think others will use it? How much of your designs will you let Sustainability Xpress dictate?

All that said: the included “find similar material” tool is worth the price of admission alone. “Show me all materials with the same or better strength but lower density”, “Show me similar materials but have a lower thermal conductivity”, etc. You can do these searches on the following properties: Thermal expansion, specific heat, density, elastic and sheer modulus, thermal conductivity, Poisson’ ration, tensile and yield strength. Now this is cooler than the sour cream you were eating!

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